News wire or news feed services are used by a number of organizations to provide up-to-the-minute news stories. For example, news feeds are used to provide stories for television and radio news broadcasts, for printed news media such as newspapers and magazines, and for online news providers and clipping services. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of such news feeds are exclusively text-based, and lack any accompanying graphics, sound bites, or video clips.
In traditional news presentation environments, such as television, radio, and newspapers, this lack of accompanying illustrative content is not a severe problem. In each of these environments, only a limited number of news stories are actually used in any given period. It is not a terribly difficult task to locate audio/video clips and/or photographs to accompany individual stories.
To help in locating appropriate audio/visual items, a production facility might choose to use one of several media management systems. There are several such systems that allow users to categorize images, video, and audio files, and to access one or more files through the use of keyword searches. Some systems also categorize text. All of these systems, however, focus on the categorization and management of media. They organize information, but do not automate the editorial process.
While an existing media management system might conceivably be adequate for some types of news distribution, it is certainly not sufficient for online news providers. An online service provider might wish to distribute a large percentage of the stories received from a news feed. To find audio/visual items manually for every one of these stories, even with the help of a prior art media management system, would be very time consuming. Nevertheless, associating multimedia content with news stories would add significant value to the services of online news providers.